The Menace That Is Uche Maduagwu

For the past few days, I have been stewing with rage, wondering if there’ll ever be an end to the madness that plagues this country. Some days ago, a persistently clout-chasing actor, whose only acting credits seem to exist in the many times he has nastily minded everybody’s business but his own on social media, took to Instagram to announce to the world that he is “proudly gay”.

The post was accompanied by the caption: “Appreciate others and share only love. We need to respect people’s choices not to judge them so let’s practice Jesus kind of love.”

In the wake of this coming out, the actor quickly made headlines in media outlets beyond even the Nigerian blogosphere. Heck, even Western media such as  Pink News and Gay Times published his coming out. Suddenly, he started getting a lot of exaltation and condemnation alike, the former from what I imagine are the LGBT community and allies, and the latter from homophobes.

However, Uche Maduagwu’s coming out would be indeed a commendable thing, if he didn’t have a sordid past that – judging by the fact that he’s deleted his old Instagram posts – it appears he wants to hide. But the internet never forgets.

This is a man who has plagued us with his rabid misogyny, persistently going after prominent female celebrities, from marriage-shaming the unmarried ones like Genevieve Nnaji, who he targeted a few times with a prophecy nobody asked for, claiming in January 2020 that the superstar actress should not “give up on love” and that “God has prepared a billionaire husband material for wedding in four months time”.

And Rita Dominic, who he claimed, shortly after his Genevieve Nnaji prophecy, would have a 2020 of “double joy, a wedding and baby girl”.

To DJ Cuppy, who he advised to quit music so that God will give her a husband; and OAP Gbemi Olateru-Olagbeji, who he chastised over a poll about dateable men she made on Twitter, saying, “At this stage in your life, you are not supposed to selecting guys, your mates are all in their husbands’ house.”

Never mind that these are successful women whose marital choices are nobody’s business.

Then there was Tonto Dikeh, who he frequently maligned, one time berating her for divorcing her reportedly abusive husband, a decision Maduagwu claimed was Tonto’s “biggest mistake”, and another time castigating her for not being a “good wife material”.

He was also targeted some other female celebrities with slut-shaming, like the time he berated the then-BBNaija 2018 Housemate, Nina Onyenobi, for apparently not knowing how to keep her legs closed, slamming the former reality show contender for spreading her legs “wide like the third mainland bridge in Lagos”, adding that “this girl has no home training at all” and advising her to “close those legs, or better still use rope to tie them so it won’t be opening anyhow when you see Miracle.”

And who can forget when he alleged that popular actresses in Nigeria sleep with married men in order to live well, saying, “Your fans are busy praying for you to get married, but you are boldly sleeping with other women husbands in Nigeria, Ghana, Dubai and everywhere around the world.”

Or when he targeted Tiwa Savage, who he lambasted over some risqué pictures she posted, attacking her photos as nudity that is “repulsive and distasteful” and admonishing her to “focus on music and your child, leave nudity for small girls or do you sometimes forget that you are a mother?”

He waged war on Bobrisky as well, frequently slamming the socialite as a feud developed between them in 2018, one time making an infamous quote about how “in the beginning, God created ADAM and EVE, not Adam and Bobrisky.”

And in 2019, he showed how perverted he is when he said that should the singer Waje kiss him, she would have no problem with her music anymore, because his love is the best vocal medicine. In the post he made, he said in the caption, “All this vocal struggle will disappear with just one SINGLE kiss from me.”

But his misogyny is by no means where his sins end.

He turned his attention-seeking lens of homophobia on the Nigerian gay community in 2020, when he lamented the supposed increasing rate of homosexuality in Nollywood, claiming that “homosexuality is gradually swallowing Nollywood” and alleging that he was raped when he first came into the industry. Over the course of 2020, he peppered social media with frequent homophobic posts that furthered the prejudice against LGBTQ Nigerians.

But never mind all that – because now, he is “proudly gay”.

And what does this proud homosexuality look like on him?

Well, in the days following his “coming out” – which seems suspiciously designed to follow the blueprint laid out by Bolu Okupe’s viral coming out – the apparently shameless Maduagwu has been posting caricaturistic pictures of himself in bras and bustiers, because, of course, how else will you reaffirm your homosexuality to “all my great fans in Naija and Africa especially UK and America”, if it’s not to further the harmful stereotype that homosexual men only exist in women’s clothes?

This has all led to one conclusion: that there is no decency or truth in Uche Maduagwu.

That Uche Maduagwu is a liar.

I do not know what his agenda currently is, whether it is a quest for asylum or a protracted ridicule of the LGBT community, but one thing is clear: whatever this clown is doing furthers the danger that plagues us as a marginalized community in this country. Think of a bad-tempered child who has access to a knife that he constantly uses to stab at a teddy bear that scares him, and his parents constantly attempt to teach him that the toy is harmless while trying to coax the knife away from him. Then, an ill wind blows in through the window, causing the teddy bear to fall off from the shelf and onto the child, both startling and then infuriating him. So, of course, you know that any progress his parents might have made so far just got ruined, because the child would interpret the teddy bear falling on him as a threat that he’d always thought it was all along.

Nigeria is the child, the LGBT community is the teddy bear, and that ill wind is Uche Maduagwu – and everybody like him – who uses such underhanded means to undermine the validity of our existence in this country. From his stereotypical depiction of what he thinks it means to be gay to his constant and desperate pleas for attention, his platform has become a weapon targeted at the LGBT community.

He needs to not be lauded. He needs to not be given the reverence that we reserve for those who legitimately take the courageous step to come out. He needs to be recognised as the liar that he is.

Now more than ever, we need more representation, more real LGBT faces out there to combat this botched mummery of our reality.

 It is for this reason that I am deciding to add my voice to this movement, masks down.

I am the writer and contributor to this blog that you all know as Kainene. My name is Emerie Udiahgebi, and I am a queer Nigerian man.

We all have many struggles in this community. But what unites us all is our truth. And Uche Maduagwu does not represent that truth.

Uche Maduagwu is a liar.

Written by Emerie Udiahgebi